Sarah Eason (email: see12b@acu.edu)
is a teaching assistant at Abilene Christian University working on an
M.A. with an emphasis in British literature, particularly Shakespeare
studies and the Victorian novel. Her thesis explores the
intersections between Christianity and mythology in fantasy
literature.

on
a dark night, Catherine Morland treads silently to an ominous cabinet
in the eerie ruins of an abbey, searching for secrets of murder and
deceit. This is the most characteristically Gothic scene in
Northanger Abbey, and
it is also a perfect example of Jane Austen’s parody of other
Gothic novels, particularly those of Ann Radcliffe. Northanger
Abbey has everything a Gothic novel needs:
a heroine, a hero, a villain, and an eerie setting. And yet,
there is something queer happening in the margins of a story that is
both Gothic and a parody of the Gothic. It is this queerness,
resurfacing throughout the novel, that causes the reader to pause; it
is a queerness found, out of all places, in the protagonist, Henry Tilney.

Austen’s use of parody results in a novel that refuses to yield itself easily
into any set genre. At times, the novel seems to follow the
Gothic storyline perfectly, offering secrets, scandal, and a damsel
in distress. At other times, however, its parodic tone
deliberately disrupts the flow of this series of events, shifting the
reader’s attention abruptly from the Gothic to the comedic.
Parody also functions as a device that directs our attention to
something similar happening with the characters
themselves—particularly Henry Tilney, whose gender performance
resists categorization in much the same way the novel resists genre
categorization. At times, he performs as the masculine hero,
but at others he clearly identifies with feminine characteristics.
Shifting between these roles depending on the situation at hand,
Henry does not fall neatly within the binary gender system.
Rather, he falls into the “other” space of the queer.

Before delving into examples of Henry’s ambiguous gender performances,
it is essential to clarify what it means to be a queer literary
character. Queerness, literarily speaking, is not a synonym for
homosexuality, but rather points out the tensions between normative
and non-normative sexualities, resisting a gender binary and
questioning the logic of gender categorization. It attempts to
illuminate normative gender as a constructed concept and examines the
consequences of not adhering to a normative gender performance.
William Hughes and Andrew Smith agree with this definition:
“Gothic is not, and never has been, an exclusively homosexual
genre. Its queerness, therefore, is more than a matter of
encoded sexual preferences and identities. . . . To be
queer, when taken outside of the sexual connotations of that term, is
to be different” (2).

Gothic literature, moreover, is an excellent space in
which to examine these “different” sorts of gender
performances because the Gothic by definition points out tensions in
seemingly “normal” heterosexual narratives. It
allows for characters whose actions, thoughts, and desires do not
fall within what normative society deems acceptable behavior.
In fact, critics for decades now have considered the Gothic to be a
queer genre for these reasons. Dale Townshend says that “Gothic
queerness, much like the work of queer theory itself, resists and
disrupts the restrictive nineteenth-century distinctions between the
heterosexual and the homosexual through a foreground of desires that
are anchored permanently in neither one nor the other” (30).
Hughes and Smith define the queerness of the Gothic in terms of a
pattern of tensions: “To be queer in Gothic terms . . .
is to juxtapose the familiar with the unfamiliar, the rational and
the supernatural, the past and the present, the acceptable and the
condemnable” (2). It is to juxtapose the normative and
the non-normative. This same juxtaposition occurs in Northanger
Abbey, where Austen weaves together the
proper societal values of Bath and the macabre secrets of a haunted
abbey. She does so through both the trope of parody and through
Henry Tilney, the queer protagonist.

Although scholars have applied queer theory to Austen texts before, little has
been said on the subject of Henry or Northanger
Abbey as a whole. Nevertheless, Henry
bears similarities to other Austen characters who perform ambiguous
genders. Edward Kozaczka, for example, claims that Persuasion’s
Anne Elliot is “not queer in the sense that she experiences
same-sex desire but rather because she gives pleasure to herself and
refuses to relegate her mind and body to the present moment”
(“Queer Temporality”). Because she rebels against
the expectations of her heterosexual society, she is queer.
Henry, too, resists societal expectations although scholars have been
reluctant to acknowledge this tension. They have instead
categorized him with terms such as the “feminized” hero,
claiming that his sensitivity enables Catherine Morland to enter into
a romance free from patriarchal oppression. Stephanie Eddleman,
for example, maintains that a feminized hero is a key component to
the Gothic romance: “The actual feminized heroes of the
female gothic novel are men of sentiment. They act
spontaneously, display excessive emotion, are often vulnerable, and
sometimes even become victimized themselves” (68). Henry
certainly meets this definition, acting spontaneously (and often
contradictorily) in his interactions with Catherine, flitting back
and forth between solemnity and sarcasm at random: “there
was an archness and pleasantry in his manner which interested, though
it was hardly understood by her” (NA
25). Additionally, he is controlled on a psychological level
and victimized by his tyrannical father, General Tilney, whose
authority is just as oppressive to Henry as it is to women such as
Catherine and Eleanor. His sensitivity, however, is often
counteracted by masculine performances for which the term “feminized”
leaves no room. His paradoxical nature begs a deeper
examination of his character, implying that he may not fit
consistently within the feminine or the
masculine spheres.

The tension in Henry’s gender identity is clear as Henry performs
different roles with Catherine and his father. Under General
Tilney’s eye, Henry is a strained, tense man; Catherine thinks
it strange that “instead of seeing Henry Tilney to greater
advantage than ever, in the ease of a family party, he had never said
so little, nor been so little agreeable” (129). With
Catherine, however, Henry comes alive with wit and charm, mocking
societal customs. After inquiring of Catherine about her time
in Bath, asking all of the appropriate questions that he finds
utterly trivial, Henry says, “‘Now I must give one smirk,
and then we may be rational again’” (26).
Catherine, unused to such sarcasm, reacts confusedly to this
ambiguous behavior: “Catherine turned away her head, not
knowing whether she might venture to laugh” (26).

Eddleman has explained this performance of Henry’s
as a recognition of Catherine as “an appropriate recipient of
his wit. Her friendly disposition and naïveté
combine to make her the perfect ‘straight man’ for his
comic routine” as he keeps her “off-balance yet
continually coming back for more” (69). It is important
to recognize, though, that Henry repeatedly knocking Catherine
off-balance reflects Henry’s own off-kilter identity, which
neither he nor Catherine (nor the reader) can ever fully grasp.
He strives to conform to normative expectations, seeking his father’s
approval, chastising Catherine for her macabre fantasies, and making
all of the conventional arrangements to receive company at his house
in Woodston. There are numerous situations, however, in which
Henry struggles to break free from these expectations in a
performance of his own, as is clear from his conversation on muslins
with Mrs. Allen, his teasing of Catherine, and his ultimate decision
to marry her despite his father’s disapproval. In his
struggle between these performances, Henry becomes an off-kilter,
ambiguous, and consequently marginalized character.

Previous scholarship has certainly noticed Henry’s feminine
characteristics, but in an effort to define Henry as a normative
hero, much of that scholarship depicts Henry as a predominantly
masculine character who, though possessing feminine qualities, does
not identify as feminine. Eddleman makes this distinction of
Henry: “Although Henry is ‘feminized,’ he is
definitely not effeminate. He is well aware of accepted female
behaviors” (68) but “operate[s] within the ‘gendered
moral framework’” (69). Henry’s ability to
perform so convincingly with various female characters, however,
suggests that his expertise on “feminine” behaviors goes
much deeper than a simple awareness of or familiarity with these
behaviors. His knowledge of fashions, fabrics, journal writing,
and even feminine internal dialogue are more than just a
surface-level parody of women; the fact that Henry is able to
accurately depict even the minutest details of femininity proves he
relates to and identifies with
femininity in these circumstances. This identification is
apparent when, for example, he dictates quite realistically what an
upper-class woman would write in her journal: “‘went
to the Lower Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue
trimmings—plain black shoes—appeared to much advantage”
(NA 26). Later, when Mrs. Allen obtrusively asks if Henry likes Catherine’s
dress, he replies, “‘It is very pretty, madam, . . .
but I do not think it will wash well; I am afraid it will fray’”
(28). Catherine is quite shocked by this response: “‘How
can you,’ said Catherine, laughing, ‘be so ——’
she had almost said, strange” (28). Henry himself admits
to Catherine that he is “‘not so ignorant of young
ladies’ ways as you wish to believe me’” (27), a
further admission of his own self-acknowledged feminine
identification in this scene. On the surface level, he parodies
this femininity; but he performs his role with such ease that
Catherine finds it shocking and thus off-putting. As she
listens to him discuss muslins with Mrs. Allen, Catherine fears that
Henry “indulged himself a little too much in the foibles of
others” (29). The “foibles of others” that he
indulges in are, without exception, always the affairs of feminine
characters.

While it is true that Catherine idolizes Henry, she stubbornly resists many
of his attempts to correct her language. When Henry criticizes
Catherine’s imprecise use of the word “nice,” she
exclaims, “‘I did not mean to say any thing wrong; but it
is a nice book, and
why should not I call it so?’” (108). Thus, even
when Henry attempts to exert masculine authority of opinion and
judgment over women such as Catherine, he is often unsuccessful.
Judith Wylie supports this notion, explaining that Henry’s
“attempts to transform Catherine into a reassuring feminine
figure by correcting her language and taming her imagination are
initiated in a manner that further reveals his ‘odd ways,’
the distance between his wobbly self-identity and the gendered role
he is expected to play” (140). This “wobbly
self-identity” is the very thing preventing him from fitting
neatly within the specific gendered moral framework. At times,
he identifies with a femininity that completely unhinges the security
of the masculinity he performs in other instances. He even
describes himself as “‘a queer, half-witted man’”
(NA 26), jokingly
acknowledging that others may perceive him as such and subtly
implying that he may not even know how to categorize himself.
His gender performance is, all in all, rather ambiguous when viewed
in the light of a gender binary system.

Henry’s gender performance can be more easily
interpreted in light of Judith Butler’s performative acts
theory. Butler explains that gender is a performance, much like
a role in a theatrical play; the act of
performing a gender is to be that
gender. In other words, one is a
gender only to the extent that one performs that gender “through
a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through
time” (903). Through this repetition of performative
acts, Henry actualizes his gender, underscoring the idea that “gender
is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various
acts proceed” (900). Furthermore, Butler argues, “if
the ‘reality’ of gender is constituted by the performance
itself, then there is no recourse to an essential and unrealized
‘sex’ or ‘gender’ which gender performances
ostensibly express” (907). The performance is the
reality.

Thus, Henry, in his ballroom scenes with Catherine, is
not merely feminized; he is the
feminine-identifying hero. Knowing that Henry performs for
Catherine in the ballroom—on the surface level, parodying
societal customs; on a deeper level, performing a feminine gender—we
can now see how his language, facial expressions, and subject matter
all contribute to his role. For example, he displays an uncanny
knowledge of muslins in his conversation with Mrs. Allen. When
she asks him if he knows the fabric, he responds, “‘Particularly
well. . . . I gave but five shillings a yard for [a gown],
and a true Indian muslin’” (28). Wylie explains
that this conversation actually allows Henry to cross-dress,
figuratively, into the feminine: “Rather than being a
fixed signifier of a stable gender affiliation, clothing has the
potential to disguise, alter, or even reconstruct the wearer’s
identity. . . . It plays upon the fixity and the fluidity
of gender construction” (131). Henry cannot physically
dress as a female, but he can perform the role. Thus, when Mrs.
Allen exclaims, “‘Do you understand muslins, sir?’”
(28), she is really marveling at the fact that our hero has
successfully maneuvered into the feminine sphere.

But Henry is also apt to play the masculine hero when
society calls for it. When his father subtly challenges Henry
to perform his masculine gendered role as a suitable host for his
guests at Woodston, for example, Henry valiantly rises to the
challenge, leaving for Woodston “about an hour afterwards”
(210). Catherine is confused: “‘the General
made such a point of your providing nothing extraordinary:—besides,
if he had not said half so much as he did, he has always such an
excellent dinner at home, that sitting down to a middling one for one
day could not signify’” (211). In his reply to
Catherine, Henry’s reservations about his performance are
evident: “‘I wish I could reason like you, for his
sake and my own’” (211). This seeming contradiction
of gendered performances actually illuminates the fact that Henry’s
gender performance does not fit within the feminine/masculine binary
of normative society. In possessing characteristics both
feminine and masculine, Henry performs a gender uniquely his own;
neither his feminine nor his masculine performance is his essential
identity or a rigid, insurmountable boundary. For this reason,
he passes from one performance to the other with a degree of fluidity
(albeit, a painful fluidity at times). His gender is ambiguous
to the reader because in constantly displacing it, his identity is
ambiguous to Henry himself, as normative society prevents him from
acknowledging the existence of his non-binary gender.

The more time Henry spends with Catherine, the more comfortable he
becomes performing this ambiguous gender, for the reason that
Catherine allows him
to. Marginalized as a woman, Catherine does not hinder Henry’s
performance, even his most feminine-identifying performances, and for
this reason he finds himself attracted to her. As with the
conversation about muslins, Henry “exercises his penchant to
verbally cross-dress almost every time he is alone with Catherine”
(Wylie 142). On their way to Northanger Abbey, Henry indulges
in describing a very feminine, Gothic fantasy to Catherine. His
goal, as with his conversation about journal writing and muslins, is
to tease Catherine for her feminine imagination. The result,
however, is that he illuminates his own strong identification with
these feminine characteristics. He asks Catherine, “‘And
are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as
‘what one reads about’ may produce?—Have you a
stout heart?—Nerves fit for sliding pannels and tapestry?’”
(157-58). For several pages, he elaborates on this fantasy.

Although his performances are not strictly feminine,
Henry Tilney does seem to perform femininity more often and with
greater ease than he does masculinity, especially around Catherine.
In fact, his overtly masculine performances rarely elicit a positive
reaction from Catherine or other females in the novel. For
example, when he later chastises Catherine for indulging in the very
ideas he conceived, asking, “‘Dearest Miss Morland, what
ideas have you been admitting?’” (198), Catherine flees
the room in tears. Not only is this chastisement a little
unfair of Henry after encouraging her imagination, but it is an
attempt on Henry’s part to exert a more masculine dominance
over Catherine and over imaginative powers associated with the
feminine. Henry ultimately realizes that these overtly dominant
performances are unnecessary with Catherine, even if they are
necessary with others, and that his own gender identity is much more
complex, a mixture of characteristics society normally associates
with both the masculine and the feminine.

Because Henry occupies the space of the queer “other,” he is
often marginalized by the other men in the novel, namely General
Tilney and John Thorpe. These men, along with Henry’s
brother Frederick Tilney, are quite aggressive in their masculinity;
they are alpha males who constantly feel the need to exert themselves
as such. During Thorpe’s first encounter with Catherine,
he shows no interest in her unless it is directly related to
impressing her with his own accomplishments. He talks only of
his horse and gig (46) or delivers “nothing more than a short
decisive sentence of praise or condemnation on the face of every
woman they met” (48). In a similar fashion, General
Tilney dominates Catherine’s attention at the beginning of her
stay at Northanger, entreating her to praise the size of his rooms
(166).

These men are upholders of normative gender definitions
and punish those who are not members of dominant, masculine society
in order to maintain order and their own security. Both
Catherine, a woman, and Henry, an ambiguous male, become threats and
thus targets of these men and what Eve Sedgwick terms their
“compulsory heterosexuality.” That is, they demand
of Henry a normative masculine performance because an ambiguous
performance threatens to expose the foundations of their society as
nothing more than a construct. As Butler says, “There is
no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be
measured. . . . Genders, then, can be neither true nor
false, neither real nor apparent” (908). Henry attempts
to oblige them in several instances and exert his dominance, but he
is repeatedly unsuccessful in his attempts. For example, when
he tries to correct Catherine’s use of the word “nice,”
his sister Eleanor makes him the butt of the joke, saying, “‘You
are more nice than wise’” (108). Many other
attempts to identify as a strictly masculine hero fail likewise.

Eve Sedgwick’s concept of homosocial desire helps us further
understand Henry’s unsuccessful attempts to identify as
masculine. Sedgwick explains that male-male relationships in
many literary works (including Gothic fiction) are “homosocial,”
not of a romantic nature in and of themselves, yet projecting their
possible feelings for each other onto a female. In order to see
this connection, we must shift our focus “temporarily from the
historicity of men’s bonds themselves to the historicity of
women’s relations to men’s
bonds” (135, emphasis mine).

This triangulation of desire could explain the
paradoxical nature of Henry’s role as the queer protagonist.
While his relationships with other men in the novel are generally
negative and Henry cannot relate directly to Thorpe, for example, he
can compete against
him for Catherine. This competition is evident when he asks
Catherine to dance and Thorpe, believing Catherine is already his
personal property, confronts her about it: “‘Hey-day,
Miss Morland!’ said he, ‘what is the meaning of this?—I
thought you and I were to dance together’” (75).
Although Henry comes up to Catherine after the confrontation and
admits, “‘That gentleman would have put me out of
patience, had he staid with you half a minute longer’”
(76), he never has direct contact with Thorpe. Instead, they
communicate through their mutual pursuit of Catherine. Sedgwick
explains that “female sexuality itself . . . is
meaningful in the novel chiefly within the context of the exchange of
power and of symbolic goods between men,” and that the novel
ends “regularly and fittingly, with the banishment of the
woman, in an ‘affair of honor’ between men” (146).
It is possible, in this light, to see that when Henry finds in
Catherine a woman who allows him to perform an ambiguous gender, he
also sees in her the mechanism by which he can relate to
masculine-identifying males and minimize his ostracism within the
masculine sphere. Winning Catherine’s love becomes
Henry’s primary means of successfully performing within that
sphere.

The success of this performance, however, is short-lived. When
General Tilney discovers that Catherine is not as rich as Thorpe
portrayed her to be—the idea of which insults the General’s
masculinity and threatens his authority—he violently banishes
Catherine from Northanger Abbey. Even though Thorpe is the one
who has deceived the General, it is Catherine, the woman, who is
perceived as a threat to the normative system and is consequently
blamed by the father figure. General Tilney views this
“queering” of societal norms as a direct attack to his
authority. Transitively, Henry is also blamed; his courtship of
Catherine is interpreted as an attempt to usurp traditional
boundaries and customs. Here, homosocial desire no longer
allows him to move unpunished and unnoticed within the masculine
sphere because Catherine is no longer the coveted object of desire.
The subsequent confrontation between Henry and General Tilney is
pivotal because Henry realizes he must choose between his father’s
normative expectations and Catherine, another marginalized
character. Ultimately, Henry’s anger at Catherine’s
oppression becomes the motivation he needs to free himself from his
own oppression:

The General, accustomed on every ordinary occasion to
give the law in his family, prepared for no reluctance but of
feeling, no opposing desire that should dare to clothe itself in
words, could ill brook the opposition of his son, steady as the
sanction of reason and the dictate of conscience could make it.
But, in such a cause, his anger, though it must shock, could not
intimidate Henry, who was sustained in his purpose by a conviction of
its justice. He felt himself bound as much in honour as in
affection to Miss Morland. (247)

Gayle Rubin explains the connection present in the oppression of
marginalized characters: “The suppression of the
homosexual component of human sexuality . . . is a product
of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women”
(qtd. in Sedgwick 3). Henry identifies with Catherine’s
punishment: no longer objectifying her or attempting to control
her language, he now accepts his social punishment—his
disinheritance—in order to be with her. According to
Wylie, in this pivotal moment, Henry breaks “from his
oppressive father and fashion[s] an identity that combines attributes
culturally gendered as both masculine and feminine: honor,
fidelity, gratitude, and sympathy for others” (144). When
he chooses to be with Catherine, Henry chooses to accept his own
gender ambiguity.

According to Eddleman, when Catherine marries Henry, she “triumphs over
male authoritarianism and achieves a union where womanly virtue and
patriarchal authority are no longer in conflict by marriage to a true
hero, one who is both manly and virtuous” (71). If
Catherine triumphs over marginalization through her marriage, then by
transitive property, it logically follows that Henry also triumphs
over his own oppressed state through the union. This argument
is strengthened by Townshend’s description of the Gothic
marriage as an event “in which hero and heroine are united to
one another in a monogamous, peculiarly asexual emotional bond”
(13). This description aligns with the narrator of Northanger
Abbey’s begrudging admission that Henry
only became interested in Catherine after he realized she loved him
first: “I must confess that his affection originated in
nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion
of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a
serious thought” (243). Theirs is not an erotic,
intensely passionate love; rather, it is a relationship based on
mutual identification in an oppressive situation. Yet, while
their love is not as much for each other as for what they can
accomplish together,
this motivation does not invalidate the significance of the match in
the least. Just as Kozaczka claims that Anne and Wentworth, in
Persuasion, “despite
forming a heterosexual union, . . . challenge the sexual
politics prevalent in England during the early nineteenth century,”
so does Catherine and Henry’s successful union challenge the
structures of their society by uniting two marginalized individuals.

Ultimately, it is essential to realize that Henry’s queerness is but one
component of the larger-scale parodic function of the novel.
Building from our earlier definition of “queer” as
anything “disrupting the social discourses” (Townshend
31) and applying this definition to the literary trope of parody as
used in Northanger Abbey,
parody itself could be considered a queer trope. Tara Ghoshal
Wallace describes the function of the parodic narrator of the novel
as keeping “both the narrative and the reader . . .
off-balance” (262). This off-balance world is reminiscent
of Mikhail Bahktin’s concept of topsy-turvy carnival, “both
outside and inside ordinary, civilized space” (Wylie 132), and,
arguably, outside and inside the normative sphere.
Specifically, the narrator juxtaposes a parody of the Gothic romance
with some elements that constitute an actual Gothic romance. On the one hand, it is
laughable to think of General Tilney as a psychopathic murderer; on
the other hand, he does turn
out to be a villain of sorts. Catherine “heard enough to
feel, that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or
shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character,
or magnified his cruelty” (247). In this way, the
narrator shakes our confidence. According to Wallace, “the
effect is to disrupt the reader’s expectation of sustained
mockery. . . . At no point can [the reader] confidently
assert that this is
the real tendency of the work, or this the
author’s final intention. . . . Northanger
Abbey refuses to yield a stable vision”
(271).

Northanger Abbey, then, lures
us into believing we can comfortably categorize it as “parody,”
only to suddenly shift across the boundary into a different genre,
producing tension for the reader. If there were any doubts as
to this effect, the narrator openly admits an ambiguous intent in the
final sentence of the novel: “I leave it to be settled by
whomever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be
altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial
disobedience” (252). Henry’s and Catherine’s
queering of normative structures through their defiance of General
Tilney is set against General Tilney’s efforts to uphold his
normative authority. The narrator’s admission at the end
of the novel that this authority has, in fact, played an important
role in bringing Henry and Catherine together through their mutual
suffering creates a conflicted reaction for the reader. In the
end, this tension we feel mirrors the tension felt as the queer
protagonist Henry Tilney shifts between feminine and masculine
performances, ultimately breaking free from associations with
either. In doing so, he performs a gender uniquely his own.